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“Do you ever think about having more kids?”
The surprise that quickly turned to wary suspicion on Gabrielle’s face made Xena regret the admittedly less-than-smooth opening. “Why?” she asked, eyeing Xena’s flat midsection. “This isn’t your way of telling me you’re pregnant again, is it?”
Xena scoffed. “Give me some credit.”
“I would, but the last time you told me wasn’t much better than that.”
Xena conceded that point by not mentioning it. She’d been particularly hormonal and emotionally overwhelmed; there were a lot of actions to hold her responsible for, but that blunder was one she felt like she could someday finally be excused for.
“What brings that question on, anyway?” Gabrielle asked, the wariness not totally dimmed by her relief that Xena was apparently not pregnant again by mystical conception. “You’re not hiding some kid in the bushes back there, are you?”
“No,” Xena denied, scowling. As if she’d ever had a problem when it came to picking up strays - strays other than the woman looking suspiciously back at her now, anyway. “You just… said some stuff, while you were really out of it.”
Instantly, Gabrielle’s expression became more fearful and guarded still. “Stuff,” she repeated cautiously.
Xena paused, and then, because she hadn’t begun the conversation just to become a coward about it, said, “You mentioned Hope.”
As predicted, Gabrielle looked away, and in an old gesture much more characteristic of her younger self, crossed her arms and hugged herself for warmth or comfort or both. Xena knew better than to interfere now that she’d set that name loose into the air around them.
All Xena had felt at Hope’s death - the last one, the one that had finally stuck - was relief. Relief that it was over, that it was one catastrophe for the world averted, that Gabrielle had survived it, that they could both forget about it and let things return to a normal that had no longer existed. She’d taken Solan’s death and buried it deep within her, but it had been Gabrielle’s death that had more recently rent her apart until she was an endless, screaming wound, and it was Gabrielle’s resurrection from the grave of her mind that had transformed the world into a new place entirely. Xena hadn’t thought about Hope, not for one moment after they’d left the barn where they’d watched her die. She wasn’t worth the effort - not in this new world of possibility and new, secret fears; not when there was a consuming grief already haunting Xena’s soul from the future.
But then, Xena had always been selfish.
“I love you,” Xena told Gabrielle now. “But I’m not so good at it, sometimes.”
Gabrielle was silent for a long while. “What am I supposed to say to that, Xena?” she asked wearily. “I still hurt. I’m sorry. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop.”
“It’s like that when your child dies,” Xena acknowledged. “And no, you don’t ever stop. But it gets easier.”
Gabrielle stared at her and absently clutched her chest as if in pain before she laughed, once, disbelieving. “Why are you bringing this up now?” she demanded. “All these years - and Eve - and - “
But her voice cut itself off.
“I was thinking,” Xena said, “that I couldn’t afford to let myself see her as your daughter. Not even when the evidence was staring me in the face, out of a face that looked just like yours. It was sick. It was like it was taunting me specifically, twisting itself into the appearance of everything in the world I loved.”
“But Xena,” Gabrielle said, pained as if all the wounds were fresh all over again, “she was my daughter.”
“I know,” Xena said sharply. “You think I could ever forget that? I was there when - and after, I was - "
Gabrielle only watched her steadily, and under her gaze, Xena faltered. Underneath those transformed eyes and body, Xena could still see her, that pale young woman who couldn’t stop shaking, who vomited after waking up to a nightmare that hadn’t ended, who crawled clammy and trembling into Xena’s arms for a protection that even Xena had started to doubt she could give. How could she say the thing she could barely acknowledge to herself in her stillest, most secret moments? It was all my fault. All of it.
Xena couldn’t bring herself to say it, not even now. Instead she said, “I’m sorry,” as truly as she knew how and hoped that Gabrielle would understand.
It was too much to ask, she knew. It was hard to look past your child’s grave to see anything else. But Gabrielle had practice with trying.
“No,” Gabrielle said at length, very quietly. “I don’t think about having more children.”